Midnight Eye

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 29th of June 2015, Midnight Eye published its last announcement. Tom Mes, Jasper Sharp, and Martin Mes signed off with a quiet declaration. After fifteen years of work, they were calling it a day. They described their site as "the main source of info on Japanese cinema in the English language." That claim raises a question: how does a non-profit website become the definitive English-language guide to an entire national cinema?

• 2. A Festival in Rotterdam

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  Tom Mes was at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000 when the idea for Midnight Eye took shape. A retrospective of recent Japanese films was running that year. What Mes saw there convinced him that no good English-language home existed for this kind of cinema. He brought his brother Martin in as designer and programmer, and enlisted Jasper Sharp as a fellow editor. By the spring of 2001, the website was live.

• 3. A Range of Voices

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  Hayao Miyazaki was among the directors who sat with Midnight Eye's contributors over the site's years of publication. Satoshi Kon, Takashi Miike, and Yuki Tanada also gave interviews that appeared on the site. Midnight Eye drew on many writers beyond its three founding editors. The body of work stretched from film reviews and analyses to book reviews as well. The founders would eventually take their editorial work into a published book.

• 4. The Guide and Its Legacy

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  The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film appeared in 2004, co-written by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp. The book gathered more than 100 reviews of Japanese films between its covers. Hideo Nakata contributed a foreword. The Criterion Collection, Forbes, Bustle, DVD Talk, and Vice were among the publications that referenced Midnight Eye's work over the years. In their retirement statement, the founders noted the site would remain as and where it was, for the time being.